Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa

Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa Frederick Cooper Downloaded from It was indeed empire that European leaders at the end of World War II needed to reconstruct. They had come very close to losing a struggle with another form of empire, the Nazi Reich, and in South East Asia they had lost valued territories to a country that had dared to play the empire-game with them— Japan. At the same time, both British and French leaders felt, with some http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ reason, that they had been saved by their empires: by the resources in men and material contributed by the dominions and colonies of Great Britain and by the symbolic importance of French Equatorial Africa’s refusal to follow Vichy, followed by the contributions of North African territories and diverse African people to the reconquest of European France from the Mediterranean. Both post-war governments acknowledged the dilemma they faced: their physical and moral weakness at war’s end meant they had to find new bases to relegitimate empire, and their economic weakness meant at Virginia Tech on July 14, 2016 they needed the production of empire all the more. Both were acutely conscious that another war might make them dependent on empire yet again. Leaders of political movements in the colonies were aware of exactly these points too. This chapter is a sketch—an attempt to lay out a way of thinking about the post-war era, a reflection on research by myself and others on a period that is only beginning to be explored. I want to avoid the common weakness of accounts of decolonization, that read history backwards from the 1960s, when the territorial nation-state emerged as the modal end-point of the evolution of colonial empires.1 In 1945, a clash among imperial powers of different sorts had just ended. In Dakar or Lagos as much as London or Paris, turning colonies into nation-states was only one possibility, and not neces- sarily the most desirable. 1 On methodological and theoretical issues in the study of colonization and decolonization, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005). Past & Present (2011), Supplement 6 ß The Past and Present Society Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa 197 In this chapter I will look in turn at five points: first, the viability of the empire-form after World War I; secondly, what happened in 1945, consider- ing the Asian roots of an African dilemma; then I will discuss political reconstruction and the building of an inclusive empire; economic reconstruction; and finally the alternatives for Africa after the war. What hadn’t happened earlier: the viability of the empire-form after World War I World War I is sometimes seen as a blow against empire, the advent of a world Downloaded from of self-determining nation-states. But only if one reads history backwards. The empires of the losers were dismantled, but various pieces were distributed to the winners. Japan’s plea for a statement condemning racism was turned down. To be sure, people in India, China, Korea, and elsewhere read Wilson’s words as if they applied to them, but at Paris they found that they did not.2 http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ There were disturbances in 1919 in Egypt, China, Korea, and India, but the powers-that-be were at the time able to stuff the genii of self-determination back into imperial bottles. Violent conflict in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt and tension in India and Indochina continued, but imperial powers had every reason to believe they could hang on to most of their colonies, in Africa for instance, and elsewhere, as in Egypt or Iraq, working through cooperative elites whose room for manoeuvre was limited. In Africa, the claims of soldiers to have paid the blood tax to France or Britain and therefore to be entitled to at Virginia Tech on July 14, 2016 some of the respect and rights of the citizen were pushed back. Indeed, the 1920s were a period of assertion of a tribal model for Africa, when Africans’ claims to citizenship were rejected, when indirect rule was given a name, when officials’ ideas for pushing development plans were considered and set aside, when colonial rulers asserted their genius for maintaining the distinct cul- tures of their subjects rather than bringing them along a road toward European models of civilization and politics.3 A new empire-building project arose in Nazi Germany, while Japan claimed its place at an imperial table. The USSR insisted that it was a multi- national polity, providing parallel structures within the Communist party and government for elites within each national group (the definitions of which frequently shifted) to advance. The United States did not establish a conception of itself as a colonial power—it did not have a Colonial Office or 2 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007); Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York, 2003). 3 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997). 198 Frederick Cooper Ministry—but it had its own repertoire of power at a distance, including the maintenance of a small number of colonies and a wider area where periodic invasions and occupations disciplined local elites when they did not cooper- ate with American interests or when revolution threatened. And American power was based on a century and a half of continental expansion, which produced a relatively self-conscious national population mainly because of the radical exclusion from the polity of people who were different, such as Indians and the descendants of slaves. These were all variants of imperial polities, some explicit in their embrace of an imperial mantle, some claiming Downloaded from to be something else. The exercise of power around the world, for all the talk of nation and of self-determination, was still exercised by a small number of powers, whose main worry was each other.4 The League of Nations provided a forum at which the conduct of colonial powers could at times be examined, but it left the judgement of what to do to http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ those powers to themselves. The mandate system indeed expanded the imperial reach of Britain and France, which made German and Ottoman territories into yet another part of a varied imperial repertoire, alongside colonies, protectorates, dominions, and spheres of influence. The League, in the end, underscored the normality of colonial empire even while suggest- ing that there were international standards which colonial powers should meet.5 In the colonial world, the 1930s deepened the involuted nature of colonial at Virginia Tech on July 14, 2016 regimes: the problems of depression could be sloughed off onto a countryside that could be deemed backward rather than impoverished, and in any case was less visible than capital cities. Then, in the late 1930s, when recovering production created new social strains without measures to relieve them, waves of strikes broke out in parts of the British empire: in the West Indies, in Northern Rhodesia, and in some port cities in West and East Africa. The confluence of strikes and riots in the former plantation colonies and in the parts of Africa most integrated into a wage economy led top officials to realize that by ‘tribalizing’ Africans they had deprived themselves of the means to think about and act on social issues in labour and in urban life that were slowly emerging as empire-wide issues.6 The illusion that Africans 4 On inter-empire conflict as a framework for history in the first half of the twentieth century, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010). 5 For the new wave of scholarship on the League, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1091–1117. 6 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996). Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa 199 lived in tribal cages and could be pushed back into them whenever authority was challenged began to fall apart as people migrated, entered new economic positions in cities and mines, and at times developed long-distance connec- tions to other people elsewhere in the empires who in their own ways were confronting imperial authority. What happened in 1945: the Asian roots of an African dilemma There are many aspects of World War II that shook empire more profoundly than the previous phase of conflagration: Hitler’s giving racism a bad name, Downloaded from economic collapse and indebtedness to the US that limited options for react- ing to problems in the colonies, and the credibility given to the alternative model of Soviet politics by its success in the war. But none was more telling than what happened in South East Asia. Dutch Indonesia, French Indochina, and British Malaya and Burma were taken over by Japan. Japan’s invasions http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ had much to do with a fear that it could be cut off from resources by other empires—it was very much an inter-empire view of the world. Japan’s post-conquest relationships with local political actors were ambiguous, but some, notably Sukarno, established a modus vivendi with Japanese officials. When Japan fell, both Sukarno in Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh in Indochina were in a position to claim the state; it would take weeks before any European troops could challenge them.

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